For any CMO, it’s vital that you continually enhance your marketing department when and where possible, ensuring that it operates as effectively and efficiently as possible. While your department handles the smaller details, you’re tasked with the big picture; details pertaining to the bottom line.
Unfortunately, it’s not always wise to concentrate so much on the bigger picture that you lose sight of the smaller ones. At times, there are issues you can miss; issues that can dramatically reduce your marketing expenses once corrected. Here are 5 easy ways to improve your marketing department and reduce your marketing expenses at the same time.
1. Invest in a Responsive Website
Medium-sized and large companies pride themselves on their high-impact websites. Moreover, they complement these websites with mobile variants as well. However, when they need to make changes to their websites, they usually have to make changes to each version; a relatively costly marketing expense. If you want a high-impact site that is cost-effective, simply switch to a responsive website.
A responsive website uses a fluid grid to scale the elements on the page. As a result, the changes made to the template will echo to the other variants of the page, ensuring relatively low maintenance costs.
2. Know your Evolving Audience
When a company begins, small, medium or large, the target audience is identified in order to better direct company resources. What many companies forget is that their target audience’s mentality may change over time. For example, a company operating for 40 years may still target their services for 20-40-year-old customers but over time, the mentality of the audience changes. Unless it is understood, your marketing expense per customer will increase.
As such, if you want to improve the impact of your marketing efforts, all you have to do is simply know your evolving audience. This ensures better-directed efforts and thus lowers your overall cost by making your marketing activities significantly more cost-effective.
3. Invest in a Blog
Companies spend thousands of dollars trying to ensure that their websites acquire significant traffic through various methods. While effective, they do cost quite a large amount of money. Fortunately, there are usually significantly easier ways to generate traffic. One of the easiest ways to do so is to simply invest in a blog.
According to research, companies that have active blogs generate 5 times more traffic than companies that do not. Not only does this help generate increased traffic, but it also improves engagement and ensures higher retention. Finally, it also helps you rank better on search result pages. The overall result is dramatically improved cost-effectiveness, particularly effort per customer.
4. Outsource as Needed
While its popularity has increased significantly over the past 2 decades, it seems that numerous companies don’t outsource when needed. At times, certain sections of various departments become inefficient and thus need to be replaced. Rather than bear the cost of hiring, simply outsource parts as needed.
For example, if your PR department has become highly inefficient, simply outsource the work. Not only do you acquire higher quality work from experienced experts, you drastically reduce your marketing costs. Moreover, you reduce other related expenses such as utility costs and various overheads.
5. Switch Online Marketing Service Providers
As stated, there are times when you need to identify and accept inefficient sectors of your company and possibly outsource the work that they do. More often than not, you will hire online marketing service providers in a bid to improve your ROI and reduce your marketing expenses.
For many companies, the most affordable online marketing service provider is usually the first choice. However, hiring an online marketing service provider that has expertise and experience on their side should be a much more important factor in the decision-making process than cost.
There is no point in spending any money at all on a solution that doesn’t deliver what has been promised; it’s a much bigger waste of resources to do that than to spend a little extra – and get what you pay for.
As such, if you feel that your current online marketing service provider is not offering the desired or promised performance, it’s a good idea to simply switch providers.
As a CMO, you need to ensure that you reduce your marketing expenses, manage sales, enhance channel management and ensure the creation, implementation, and maintenance of your marketing strategy. The above tips will help you do just that as you improve your marketing department and reduce your marketing expenses.
If you’re looking for an online marketing agency to partner with your marketing department, fill out our contact form today. We’d be happy to discuss your needs and develop a customized plan to augment your department’s marketing strategy.
